Prostitution, trafficking and feminism: An update on the debate

Within the academy the 'sex work' position, i.e. that prostitution should be understood as legitimate work, and an expression of women's choice and agency, has become the dominant perspective. Most feminist scholars now take this point of view or show sympathy towards it. The critical approach to prostitution that was almost universal amongst feminists from the nineteenth century up till the 1980s, that prostitution arises from and symbolizes the subordination of women, is much less often expressed. The 'sex work' position has been extended to the issue of trafficking of women into prostitution through the transformation of trafficking into 'migration for labour' (Agustin, 2007). This new approach to trafficking, which draws a veil over the human rights issues involved and carefully removes the issue of the destination of the vast majority of trafficking in women, prostitution, from view, is fast becoming predominant amongst feminist academics writing on the issue in the fields of development studies and migration studies (Jeffreys, 2006). Unfortunately, some of the articles in this issue of Women's Studies International Forum demonstrate some of the common elements and problems of the new dominant ideology amongst feminist scholars. The 'sex work' position emerged from some sex workers' rights organizations in the 1980s (Jeness 1993). It gained strength from a sexual liberalism which portrayed pornography and prostitution as forms of 'freedom', and rejected any suggestion that they might be abusive to women (Jeffreys, 1990). This sexual liberalism was identified by its supporters as 'sex-positive' and those, mainly radical feminists, who criticize the whole construction of sexuality under male dominance as the eroticizing of women's subordination and argue for total transformation, as 'sex-negative'. This sexual liberalism joined up with the economic ideology of neo-liberalism in the next two decades to the point where the industries of pornography and prostitution came to be seen by governments as nice little earners (Jeffreys, 2009). Milton Friedman, the American sage of neo-liberalism, argued that pornography and prostitution should be decriminalized and subject to the ordinary rules of the market (Ammeson, 2006). As a result of these trends the global sex industry has been legalized, tolerated and normalized, and has become hugely profitable for domestic economies and in the global economy. Women's bodies are now well and truly launched into the marketplace as the basis of large profits for many different enterprises, the telecommunications companies that carry pornography, the credit card companies that the male buyers use, the banks that lend to the industry, strip club chains, the governments that tax legalized prostitution, the governments that gain foreign currency from the women sent abroad as 'entertainers'. In the global economy women from poor countries are trafficked to richer ones, or used in situ by prostitution tourists in what I define as the 'outsourcing of women's subordination' (Jeffreys, 2009). Meanwhile the average earnings of the prostituted women, whose vaginas and anuses are the raw materials of this industry, are well below the average wage in western countries (DeRiviere, 2006). It is radical feminists and those whom the writers in this issue call 'abolitionists', i.e. those who seek to rein in men's behaviour in the prostitution of women, that have called these processes into question... Keywords: Human trafficking Language: en